


Watching Emporia Burn

by SixDots



Category: BioShock Infinite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-10-06 12:07:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20506757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SixDots/pseuds/SixDots
Summary: Rosalind watches Emporia burn and reflects on her decisions.





	Watching Emporia Burn

**Author's Note:**

> Contains spoilers for Bioshock Infinite so probably best not to read if you haven't played it yet :)

There would always be something somewhat painful about watching Emporia burn.

Columbia had been flawed in so many ways, everything only a cover for a sea of intolerable, hateful people, and yet it had still been a home. The cafes where they’d sat and watched people, shops they’d bought their groceries from, streets they had walked and wandered and debated and discussed theories and concepts that then had seemed far fetched and now seemed nothing but normal.

Out of all of Columbia this had been where they had spent the greatest amount of their 16 years together.

They were both stood side by side in front of the Lutece Labs as they sometimes did whilst waiting for the experiment to play out its course. The building still stood but the windows were barred up and they knew the inside was a mess of wrecked and upturned furniture, still in a state of inconsistency from the tears.

The silence began to stretch out around them.

It wouldn’t be long before the square erupted in yells and fighting, Dewitt would push his way through as he always did, but for now it was still with only the crackling of a fire burning in the distance and the shifting fabric of red Vox flags blowing in the wind.

“It’s almost..”

“sad?”

“Precisely,”

Rosalind paused, struggling to find the words to convey what she wanted to express.

She was no less emotional than her brother, after all they were the same person, but she liked to think she had a much stronger reign on how much she let her emotions effect her. Yet occasionally there’d be this pressing need to give words to them, like they’d been held in too long and they were ready to burst free and when those moments came it always felt a little overwhelming.

“This place was never right,”

She was sure of that, the people, the ideas, as much as she turned a blind eye to it, she could never agree with it,

“but I still…,” she was caught again but this time Robert just waited patiently for her to continue.

“It still hurts to watch it burn”

She stared at the lab unblinkingly.

Dewitt would be on his way but they had time.

They always had time.

There was always so many feelings when they got to this part of the journey, if they made it this far into the journey, Colombia would always mean that little bit more to her than it did to Robert.

It had been her great project, her success, her legacy. She had written the plans, had been at every meeting, had made reality of the prophets ideas. She had built this city and now she had to watch it crumble and fall apart around her.

What would happen if the their plan succeeded? If every reality where Comstock had been ceased to exist then where would she find her funding. What would become of her life. There was no way of guaranteeing she’d take the same paths without his influences, without the parameters and specifications that Comstock had needed.

In a world without that would she find the means to create or would she never move forwards. Would she be left on her own, a struggling scientist, desperately trying to make her voice heard above the world around her?

She found herself longing for what had been.

She remembered the day she’d first opened the door to the lab, finally being able to have her own space, her own name written below the desk. All the years of work finally amounting to something she could so physically grasp at.

She remembered her pride, how wonderful everything had seemed in those first few weeks and she remembered the loneliness that had followed.

She’d fought to ignore it, pushing it away with hour after hour of work and research, until, somehow, she'd stumbled on the little flashes of coded message travelling through that single particle, the little messages that had become Robert.

She remembered the delight at finding someone else who understood her, remembered the overwhelming fear as Robert, pulled from his world to her own, lay bleeding and bleeding, the lifeless look in his eyes. She remembered the relief when he’d started to get better, adjusted day by day and filtered his way into every aspect of her life.

She wanted to walk into the lab, just once more, and run her hands over the books, hang her coat by the door and fold her scarf on the table by the door. She wanted to sit by the hearth and listen to record after record from her armchair, listen as Robert hummed along until the fire died out.

She wanted to loose track of the hours as they tested theory after theory, suspending things around the house for no reason other than the fact that they could.

Wanted to power up the device, open tears and be able to stare into them for hours without the knowledge of everything that lay beyond them.

She wanted simplicity and ignorance and part of her hated herself for that, after all, hadn’t she always strived to try and know everything, desperate to find the answer to every question?

“What if I hadn’t made us do this”

Robert stirred her from her thoughts.

“Hadn’t made us do what exactly?”

She knew what he meant but still reached for certainty.

“Hadn’t tried to fix this, what if we’d continued like we were, what if I hadn’t made you take part”

She’d pondered the same thought herself on occasion. What if they had just continued as they were and left the girl's life to play out as Comstock had wanted.

The world below would burn, she knew that, and no matter what that would always be partly her fault. Comstock may be the one leading it, his ideas guiding it, but she had built his city, she’d given him to tools, she’d made this possible.

But what would have happened to them, would they have lived on happy with each others company till their death? Would death have taken them both at once or one at a time, would they be torn from the others company?

Would she have been left, once again without her brother in a world of loneliness, surrounded only by the hell she had built.

And no matter what, she knew Robert would be unhappy.

She’d watched the way the guilt had eaten at him over the years. She’d watched it drain him piece by piece, watched him grow more and more absent, more and more desperate for some way to change what they’d done.

She’d seen it everyday they watched the girl in the tower, how much he'd wanted to reach out, how much trapping her with the syphon had hurt him. Still watched it every time a Booker didn't succeed and another Elizabeth was left to her fate.

She couldn’t have let him live on in that.

How funny it was that Robert was haunted by the pain he felt for others while she was haunted only by the pain she had caused him.

“We would both have been unhappy" He looks at her as if unsure of her reply.

"If you hadn’t made this choice for us, we would both have been altogether and forever miserable and I can’t say that life like this is void of pain, but-”

She hooked her arm round his giving him a smile,

“Dear brother, as long as I am with you, as long as I am not alone, I am content. No matter how our story ends, as long as I have you, I am content.”

He smiled back at her softly placing a hand over her arm round his.

“Time to move on”

“Time to move on”


End file.
